The operations blog

What distribution should I choose?

One of the first step to become LFCS is to choose a distribution where your exam will be based on, the three options are the most used and relevant in the current IT market.

The Linux distributions offered for the Exam are the following:

CentOS 7

openSUSE 13.1

Ubuntu 14.04

My dilema started wondering why should I choose a distro and what are the diferences between each of them.

I spent some time researching about and comparing to make a decision, I also asked for advise from some experienced friends and get their ideas about this topic.

At the end of the day, I wanted to choose a widely used and stable distro which will help to meet my goals in a short and long period of time.

Research and online course

Part of my decision process was to investigate and to realize what comes with each distributions and why should I choose one!!?. So I started a FREE introduction course from Edx.org recommended by the Linux Foundation where I got a lot of useful information.

I realized that each distributions are shared by the linux kernel and on top of that comes all the specific settings for each distribution. Also something that usually change are the packet management or the way that the system it’s updated or get the applications, for example: yum (CentOS), apt(Ubuntu) and zypper(OpenSuse).

What my friends said:

I tried the internet philosophy in real life, if you have a problem you can ensure that someone else had it before than you and luckily you will find an answer. I went to my experienced friends and they gave me their personal view about it:

Friend 2: “I would say Ubuntu, we use Ubuntu here (His company) for a lot of stuffs and for starters it’s a good distribution”.

Friend 3: “The distributions don’t really matter, they are quite similar and it’s not too difficult to swap between them”

Friend 3 was key to make my decision.

Making the decision

Key part of my career has been making good decisions, most of the time for professional matters I try to investigate and make decisions based on knowledge, when I don’t do it I fail miserably, in any case I chose CentOS 7 for the following reasons:

CentOS is based in Red Hat and is widely used in enterprises and also very stable, my aim it’s to work with hybrid infrastructure on premise or in the cloud so this sounded like a good idea.

I do have some experience with Ubuntu in the past, thus I wanted a challenge and learn something new from scratch would help on that, again CentOS was the best option.

Microsoft and Red hat started a partnership in 2015, which makes me think that great things will come from it, also remember this my path to become MCSA on Azure (Microsoft certified solution associate Linux on Azure).

What my third friend said about the distribution, made me realize that even though I choose CentOS as my favorite distribution I’ll still be able to throubleshoot a server regardless the distro that came with it.

I am very happy with the decision that I took, it is a fact that when you know more about a topic, more you love it. I am having great time learning Linux.

I know that choose a distribution it’s a personal decision but I hope if you are in the same situation than I was this helps you to make a move in your career.